Sheryl Crow on Recording With Vince Gill for ‘Threads’: ‘Anything He Sings Makes Me Cry’

Sheryl Crow enlisted the help of plenty of music stars, from all genres, to collaborate with her on each of the 17 songs on Threads, what she calls her final album. But at least one of her favorites is with Country Music Hall of Fame member, Vince Gill, who sang with Crow on “For the Sake of Love,” one of only three songs that Crow penned by herself on the album.

“Anything he sings makes me cry,” Crow told Entertainment Weekly about Gill. “I mean, he could sing the freaking phone book and it just would kill me. He has that voice, and he’s also been just a dear, dear friend, he and [Gill’s wife] Amy [Grant] both. When I moved to Nashville, I only knew three people, Vince, Amy, and Emmylou [Harris], and I think I’d been there two weeks when Vince called me up and said, ‘Hey, bring your guitar down, let’s do a guitar pull for St. Jude.’

“If you’re open-hearted, he’s right there and he pulls you in and makes sure you feel like you have your people,” she added. “And every time I’ve asked him to do anything, he’s always said yes.”

The love between Crow and Gill clearly goes both ways, with Gill praising Crow, both personally and professionally.

“She’s one of my best pals, and I just adore what she does,” Gill said of Crow. “When you’re musical and you have a musician side to you, which she does, it’s real easy to just want to be part of her band.”

Gill is far from the only country collaboration Crow has on Threads. She also sang with Chris Stapleton, Maren Morris, Harris, Jason Isbell, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and even the late Johnny Cash. Stapleton not only sang with Crow, but he also co-wrote both the song he sang with Crow, “Tell Me When It’s Over,” as well as “Flying Blind,” which Crow sang with James Taylor.

“It was a song that I didn’t record for the country record, but I always loved it and I pulled it out and I was thinking about James and I thought, you know this would be a really nice song for us to do,” Crow recalled. “There is something about this song too, just about looking back and accepting the past for being in the past and being in the moment now. There’s a lot of that on this record.”

Threads is available for purchase at Crow’s website.

Photo Credit: Getty images / Jeff Kravitz